One of the police officers executed in a gun-and-grenade attack may have been trying to defend herself when she died. An eye-witness said they saw a Taser stun gun in the hand of Pc Fiona Bone, 32, as her body lay on the ground outside the house were she and colleague Pc Nicola Hughes were brutally attacked in a hail of gunfire and a hand grenade explosion.

HERO: PC Fiona Bone may have been trying to defend herself using a Taser stun gun

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One of the police officers executed in a gun-and-grenade attack may have been trying to defend herself when she died. An eye-witness said they saw a Taser stun gun in the hand of Pc Fiona Bone, 32, as her body lay on the ground outside the house were she and colleague Pc Nicola Hughes were brutally attacked in a hail of gunfire and a hand grenade explosion.

A spokeswoman for Greater Manchester Police confirmed a Taser gun was found out of its holster on the ground beside the two stricken officers and forensic experts were examining it.

And chief constable Sir Peter Fahy revealed his officers could still be under threat and there could be more grenades on the streets of Greater Manchester.

Sir Peter said: "We are not confident that we have recovered all the grenades, we don’t know for certain, so we’ve made it clear to our officers that the threat is still there.

"I would want that to be the message, that the threat is very much there."

He warned there has been a long-running criminal feud in Manchester and Tameside which has left his officers under threat.

</p> <p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Sir Peter added: "As we’ve indicated as part of this inquiry, we’ve had to issue essentially what we call Osman warnings, threat notices, to a large number of individuals who we felt could be at risk as a result of this particular series of events."</p> <p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Post-mortem results revealed Pc Bone and Pc Hughes both died of gunshot wounds.</p> <p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">They were responding to what was considered a ‘routine burglary call’ when they were targeted in Mottram, Tameside, at 11am on Tuesday.</p> <p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Residents reported hearing 13 shots before a massive explosion.</p> <p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Others saw the two officers ‘left for dead’ in a pool of blood in the street. Pc Bone died of massive injuries at the scene of the attack in Abbey Gardens.</p> <p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">An unnamed witness said: "She had a Taser in her hand and she was lying by the window of the house."</p> <p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Pc Hughes, 23, died within two hours at Tameside Hospital. Moments after they were gunned down, one of Britain’s most wanted men, Dale Cregan, who police had been hunting for several weeks in connection with the murder of dad David Short and his son Mark, handed himself in at nearby Hyde police station. It is understood that a desk officer kept him talking while an armed unit was scrambled to the scene, and he was arrested.</p> <p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">As revealed in the M.E.N. several weeks ago, Cregan was arrested over Mark Short’s murder in May but released on bail.</p> <p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Detectives launched a manhunt for him after David Short was killed in a gun and grenade attack at his home in Clayton in August. But he remained at large for more than four weeks.</p> <p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">He was still being quizzed by detectives last night on suspicion of murdering the two officers and David Short, 46, and Mark Short, 23. Officers also arrested a 28-year man in the Hattersley area yesterday on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder and he was also still being questioned last night.</p> <p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Detectives believe the ‘fake burglary call’ may have been made by Cregan or an associate. Sir Peter confirmed the crime scene at Abbey Gardens was still cordoned off to allow fragments of the grenade to be recovered. He also revealed the firearm used had been recovered and said they were determined to bring to justice anyone who had been engaged in a ‘criminal conspiracy’.</p> <p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Sir Peter said there was no intelligence or information to suggest that the address where the officers were sent posed any greater threat than any other call. He said: "There was nothing in our intelligence systems or information systems that had come to light that indicated that the risk at this address was any greater than any other that we have been called to."</p> <p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">He added: "We get hundreds of calls to incidents, all sorts of crimes like anti-social behaviour, and clearly we can’t send armed officers to every single one of those."</p> <p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">After GMP held a one-minute silence, Sir Peter also thanked the public for their support – and said the force had been overwhelmed by the outpouring of grief from the community.</p>